Libraries Have Impact: Raising the Profile schedule

Tuesday 5th November 2013

Library services in academic institutions have often been taken for granted as something that the organisation needs to have in place in order to achieve its teaching, learning, research and student experience objectives. This expectancy that an institution would have some form of library service had perhaps led to complacency in the institution asking the library to account for itself and similarly in the library justifying its activities and the value and impact that the service has on achieving the organisations strategic goals.

In more challenging economic times, both the further and higher education sectors have sought to make efficiencies and we have seen library services (including other professional services which may be converged within the library) become scrutinised more and more as senior managers have tried to re-allocate resources to focus on the fundamental teaching, learning and research objectives of the institution.

Whilst library managers have always endeavoured to ensure that the services, resources and facilities that they are delivering are fit for purpose, responsive, up to date, and subject to continual quality assurance, this is not always apparent to other academic partners and stakeholders within the institution. This keynote presentation will focus on how libraries and library managers can engage with their institution, including students, academic and management colleagues and indeed library staff, to ensure that the strategic and operational activities of the library are fully aligned with the institution’s strategic plan. This can often mean doing things differently, offering new services or changing the ways that the library supports the institution. In effect, aligning library strategy can often mean large scale ‘change’ which needs strong leadership and management from library managers. The presentation will discuss how library managers can develop strategic and operational plans which sit at the heart of the organisation’s strategic vision.

Leo Appleton is Associate Director of Library Services at Liverpool John Moores University. He has worked in several further and higher education institutions where he has managed a range of services including libraries, IT support, customer services, e-learning and student administration.

Texting and chat are completely accepted means of communication. Add to that the subsequent sharing of pictures, video, whiteboard, live screen share and face to face conference video links and you can be readily available to support enquiries when and where the learner makes them.

Google Hangouts provides a suite of communication tools in a single interface that can be used by anyone with a Google account. Try out the features first hand and participate in a discussion about their potential uses. This session is aimed at those who are not familiar with Hangouts, also covering Hangouts On Air which enables live streaming and recording through YouTube.

Now more than ever information and library services teams are required to identify their impact and demonstrate their involvement in the learner journey. This highly interactive workshop will introduce delegates to a range of simple and cost effective tools (both technological and not!) to help with both formative and summative assessment of learner progress that will satisfy the evidence needs of even the most hardened Senior Management Teams!

Rebus is a reading list product from PTFS, who has previously supplied Staffordshire University with Koha, an open source library management system. As early adopters of Rebus, the University were offered the first version of the product at a reduced cost.

One of the strategic objectives of the University is to implement ‘The Staffordshire Graduate’ - a coherent set of skills, attributes and capabilities necessary for success in the 21st Century, including the attribute to be technologically, digitally and information literate. Students expect all their resources in one place (which they are with Rebus and these link into Blackboard) but we have evidence of Rebus actually promoting additional reading and resource use.

This session will investigate how Staffordshire University started with a weblink and are now rolling out online reading lists to staff from across the University. From promotion (see attached poster) to training, a 12 month look at what has happened from day one. What was good, what was surprising, what needs improving, what lessons can be learnt and what happens next.
There will also be ample opportunity for delegates to discuss their experiences of using online reading lists and for those contemplating buying a product, come along and listen to others’ experiences!

Explore how Augmented Reality can enhance library guides and posters, find out how to create your own augmented resources using a range of apps and web tools. This session could also be of interest if you are looking for ways to enhance your web presence or VLE pages.

At a time when learners are bombarded with information, how do we make ourselves visible and memorable? Middlesbrough College’s Learning Resources Centre (LRC) has used different innovative induction methods to raise the profile of the LRC and its services. The LRC induction is considered one of the most important aspects of the learner’s experience, as it ensures and enables access to essential systems and creates awareness of LRC services.

Today’s students are constantly being surveyed to find out their opinions and views and to demonstrate impact and the library services have to play their part in this. But do we really create surveys that actually tell us very much? This interactive workshop will provide delegates with the tools to create effective surveys that tell a richer story. Using the framework Inspiring Learning for All attendees will create surveys that count! By the end of the workshop each delegate will have the outline of a survey that they can take away and use in their own organisation.

This summer Jisc Collections has invested over £200,000 and added 53 new titles to the ebooks in FE collections. This presentation will discuss how the titles were chosen, how they can be accessed and what happens next.

Short description: The CLA introduced the new Education Licence for FE providers on 1 August this year. Find out how you can make full use of the titles covered under the Licence for teaching and learning with a whistle-stop tour of your dedicated website for FE.

Making the decision to subscribe to a database is a big commitment, but is only the start of the library’s job. In this session we’ll look at how Cengage Learning can help you market and support your products, and how you can track and drive usage by getting your library products used by staff and students in the classroom.

Liz will talk about their experiences providing Higher Education library provision in a Further Education environment. There will be a particular emphasis on the college online library including the Ebsco Discovery Service.

Libraries need to enhance the student experience and embrace new technologies but they also need to manage with reduced budgets. Open source software is now well established as a mainstream choice for libraries wishing to migrate to a new system. The workshop will give an overview of the open source systems supported by PTFS Europe and the way in which a good support company can make such a move an attractive and viable option. The workshop will introduce:

Koha – the leading open source library management system, completely web-based for both staff and end users. Core modules comprise a highly configurable OPAC, acquisitions with EDI, circulation, cataloguing, serials control and reporting.

VuFind – a resource discovery system used to provide a single point of access to a wide range of information resources. It is able to harvest data from your library catalogue, digital archives and institutional repositories that offers users a single search returning clearly defined results from the combined resources.

Rebus:list – a subscription service developed to offer a significant advance in the effective management of the entire workflow involved in the delivery and presentation of reading lists.

CUFTS – providing libraries with the ability to manage electronic resources together with an integrated journal A-Z database and a link resolver for your library.

WordPress for libraries – a leading content management system, able to provide a library’s entire web presence.

The right to read alliance estimate 1 in 8 people have a print impairment. The Literacy Trust estimate 1 in 5 has a reading age more than 2 years below their chronological age. Library and learning resources have a "target rich environment" in terms of helping reluctant readers to become life long learners. In this session Jisc TechDis looks at the training, the tools, the policies and the practice that can put libraries at the heart of meeting learner needs.

QR codes have become increasingly ubiquitous for promoting information and can be found on billboards, drinks cans and even cross-channel ferries. The library at Bradford college has explored a number of ways of getting the most out of QR codes in order to make literature and marketing material more engaging. This workshop will examine both the advantages and disadvantages of using QR codes and examples of good practice will be demonstrated.

Triptico is an ever-growing collection of engaging, adaptable, interactive resources for educators. It was designed and created by David Riley for use in his own classroom, and is becoming one of the most popular resources in colleges across the North West.

Triptico gives you the power to add interactivity to your sessions and can be customised with ease to suit any subject, age range and level of learning. In this fun and interactivity session I will demonstrate how Triptico can be used to easily create engaging, interactive and fun LRC inductions and explain the differences between the free and subscription version.

At the end of this session you will be empowered with the knowledge and knowhow to throw away those post-it notes and printouts and bring your LRC inductions into the interactive world of Triptico. ............